This thesis studies ways of broadening the range of a piezoelectric flow induced vibration harvester. The proposed device consists of a flap connected with a hinge to a spring. Existing harvesters are designed to replace or charge batteries for low power systems in the range of milliwatts. These systems produce low amounts of power, but for low flow speeds. The objective of this thesis is to in...

A novel piezoelectric energy harvester equipped with two piezoelectric beams and two cylinders was proposed in this work. The energy harvester can convert the kinetic energy of water into electrical energy by means of vortex-induced vibration (VIV) and wake-induced vibration (WIV). The effects of load resistance, water velocity and cylinder diameter on the performance of the harvester were inve...

Cantilevered beams with piezoceramic layers have been frequently used as piezoelectric vibration energy harvesters in the past five years. The literature includes several single degree-of-freedom models, a few approximate distributed parameter models and even some incorrect approaches for predicting the electromechanical behavior of these harvesters. In this paper, we present the exact analytic...

The problem of optimizing influence diffusion in a network has applications in areas such as marketing, disease control, social media analytics, and more. In all cases, an initial set of influencers are chosen so as to optimize influence propagation. While a lot of research has been devoted to the influence maximization problem, most solutions proposed to date apply on directed networks, consid...

The problem of optimizing influence diffusion in a network has applications in areas such as marketing, disease control, social media analytics, and more. In all cases, an initial set of influencers are chosen so as to optimize influence propagation. While a lot of research has been devoted to the influence maximization problem, most solutions proposed to date apply on directed networks, consid...

Abstract — With the rapid expansion of portable consumer and industrial devices, there is a present need for small, wireless, and portable power sources. Aside of traditionally used batteries, energy harvesting is one of the options that seems particularly attractive and cost efficient. This paper presents a novel method of retrieving energy from an electromagnetic field surrounding a current-c...

In this paper, we present a method to model and control the interface electronics in order to obtain maximum power transfer from a rotational energy harvester. A state-space representation of a boost converter (with component parasitics) was derived and embedded in a control loop that performs input impedance matching to the armature resistance of the rotational harvester. Root locus techniques...

Nacrtak An experiment on the growing and harvesting of willow trees aimed at short rotation forestry was conducted in northern Japan. Willows were harvested using a sugarcane harvester from southern Japan during its agricultural off-season. The growing experiment showed the high potential of willow plantations to produce woody biomass of more than 10 dry-t/ha/y. The harvesting experiment showed...

Domestic service robots are currently powered by the mains electricity. The growing multiplication of such devices negatively impacts our environment. In this study, we show the feasibility of harvesting energy from natural light in an indoor environment. The design of the harvester is carefully carried out using an experimental characterisation of several solar panels, while the boost converte...

A photocatalytic system for CO2 reduction exhibiting visible-light harvesting was developed by preparing a hybrid consisting of a supramolecular metal complex as photocatalyst and periodic mesoporous organosilica (PMO) as light harvester. A Ru(II) Re(I) binuclear complex (RuRe) with methylphosphonic acid anchor groups was adsorbed on acridone or methylacridone embedded in the walls of PMO mes...